


Ships in the Night

by aebleskiver



Category: Band of Brothers
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Angst, Established Relationship, Implied/Referenced Alcohol Abuse/Alcoholism, M/M, Period Typical Attitudes, War, basically: nix gets wounded at bastogne and misses most of the rest of the war in europe, injuries/disabilities
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-02-09
Updated: 2020-02-23
Packaged: 2021-03-12 16:55:09
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 2
Words: 8,338
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/22625326
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/aebleskiver/pseuds/aebleskiver
Summary: "I bet you didn't expect to find me like this," Dick says, motioning vaguely leftwards with a tentative smile on his lips.Nix just stares. "I expected you to be dead."Nix is wounded at Bastogne. It goes downhill from there.
Relationships: Lewis Nixon/Richard Winters
Comments: 35
Kudos: 129





	1. Part One

**Author's Note:**

> oooof here we are. these fucking guys. thanks for reading <3

It happens in Bastogne.

He remembers it like this: the earth disappears from beneath his feet, changes states before his eyes, becomes something liquid and mobile. The air dissolves into light. He becomes weightless, spirited upwards, suspended in soupy night. 

When he hits the ground, he breathes blood.

Dick had wanted to go inspect the line after the sun went down; Lew had followed because his feet were going numb, and because it was what he did. Two of the men had a fire going, concealed haphazardly by tree branches and piled snow, and though Dick would have gotten on their asses for it, he had hesitated. Just slightly. An acknowledgment, maybe, of the cold night ahead. Or maybe Dick was a human, too, with human needs for warmth and light in this dark, dark forest. Lew was just beginning to voice a warning, his toes wriggling in his boots as they absorbed the heat of the flames, when the first artillery rounds pierced the trees above their heads.

And now he’s on his back, the ground solid again beneath him and Dick hovering above him, shouting in his face. The message is lost; Lew's ears must be ringing, though all his senses have gone mysteriously blank, his nervous system rebooting frantically in the chaos. Dick’s hands are on his throat, his chest, stemming the flow of blood that is not gold, like whiskey, but black in the low light. 

Another round explodes in the trees above their heads, sends splinters raining down like leaves in fall. Lew watches Dick’s face contort around the word medic, can almost feel the force of his scream. He wants to scream himself, but his mouth is full of something viscous. Dick is looking at him intently, now, pressing down hard on his neck. Lew wants to tell him to lay off. You’re hurting me, he wants to say. This isn’t like you.

“Hold on, Lew,” Dick says, his words finally materializing through the haze. “We’re gonna get you out of here.”

Pain is spreading outwards from multiple points across the top of his body. The blood that remains in his veins feels sludgy and slow. Dick looks worried, lips a hard line. 

“Hold on,” Dick says again. “For me.”

Lew supposes he can do that, and he does for a while, until the world shifts again—he’s being carried. Familiar sight and sound recede. After a while he realizes he’s not looking up at Dick anymore, but rather at the high indigo dome of a sky, peppered with stars. 

He makes it through several field hospitals, tracing back further and further from the front line, before he’s conscious again. And then it’s really only a kind of provisional consciousness, a working prototype of the real thing wherein he can only lift himself high enough for the sheets to be changed out from underneath him. Can only speak in a ragged whisper, when asked for his name and rank, and besides that doesn’t speak at all. Once back in England, the sky above him is a gray slab. A hand, disembodied, presents him with a Purple Heart. 

There is shrapnel in his chest that they operate several times to remove the most offending pieces of. But the tear in his throat is more significant; it nearly drained him of the sum total of the blood in his body. Pleasantly, he cannot see what remains of the skin there. What sort of poultice of mutilated flesh awaits him is concealed by bandages day and night. 

Time and thought are absorbed into unreality. He cannot lift his arms to read or write or drink, or do anything else that might ground him in the moment. If he could speak in coherent sentences he might coerce the Scottish nurse into smuggling something in for him, but as it is residual pain from his wounds distracts him from any alcohol withdrawal symptoms.

Eventually, they deem him well enough to be propped up against the pillows, and the men in the cots around him seem to take this as invitation to speak. “Infantryman?” asks the man to his left, the one with the missing leg whose eyelashes are nearly as translucent as Dick’s.

“Paratrooper,” rasps Nix, shifting his gaze as far to the side as he can without turning his stiff, wrapped neck. 

“Damn, you guys have really been in the shit out there, haven’t you?”

Nix makes a noise that he hopes is sufficiently neutral. He thinks, _I’ve never fired my weapon._ He thinks, _you should see this guy Dick. Puts his head down and runs straight into the Krauts like there’s something wrong with him._ He says, “What day is it?”

“The tenth.”

“Of what month?”

“February.”

“Jesus fuck,” breathes Nix, and counts backwards as best he can with his muddled mind. It was past Christmas in Bastogne, he thinks. Just shy of New Year’s. God knows where they all are now. 

He’s been floating here, adrift on painkillers and the endless, artificial daylight of the lamps above his head. The letter from Dick, dated December 28, doesn’t arrive for another four days. 

The Scottish nurse asks if he’d like her to read it out, and he quickly declines. Despite having confidence in Dick’s scrupulousness, there’s an intimacy to it that feels wrong to share. The letter is as carefully composed as ever, mindful of the censors. Two paragraphs of updates on the state of Easy Company, latest wounds and deaths, a funny anecdote about shitting in a foxhole. And then this, at the end: _Strange to not have you out here. Feel unbalanced walking around without you flanking me. You better get healed soon. Hang tough._

He chuckles, though it pulls agonizingly on his throat, and then feels inexplicably like crying. The pain, he supposes. 

He could go AWOL, the way so many Easy men had, and start the haul back to the front. But he can hardly raise his arms long enough to read the letter. He hasn’t stood on his own feet in weeks, his vision swimming with every turn of his head. There is a part of him that felt a little invincible, these last few years, leaping into the night the way they did. Avoiding Kraut bullets by a fraction of an inch, a second. Stealing Dick away when eyes were turned the other way. Hubris does not go unpunished. 

The next letter from Dick doesn’t arrive for another two weeks, despite being dated only a few days after the first. This one does away with an attempt at levity. Nix thinks once again of Dick’s face, that last night, looking down on him as he bled. The arrangement of his features, the push and pull of his mouth, betrayed nothing. It was all in the eyes. A wild, restless fear. Nix thinks he can feel it in the words, now, in the tight scrawl of Dick’s handwriting. 

_Things are not improved here. Maybe it’s better you’re out there, safe._

Nix knows he should write back. Let Dick know he’s alright, that he’ll be back soon, even if those both feel like lies. To construct the right message, assemble the words and control the tone so as not to make Dick worry more than he already does, seems impossible in his present state. Instead, he plays a very slow game of Spades with the man to his left, using only one hand, and lying motionless on his back while picturing what life was like when his body was something that obeyed his commands. When he could use it to corner Dick against a wall in whatever farmhouse they were quartered in, kiss him until the knot of tension that Dick carried eternally between his shoulder blades began to unravel. 

February ends and he begins to stagger around the hospital grounds, his head feeling light and empty on his shoulders. They remove the bandages from his neck and chest and he finds a mass of tousled skin, reddish-pink and raised, as barren and pockmarked as a battlefield. He’s still mildly deaf in one ear. But his feet move, his lungs fold and unfold. When no more letters come in from Dick, he sits down to write one of his own with a hand now strong enough to hold a pen, his gut twisting with questions about the sudden silence. There are plenty of logistical reasons, he knows, for why Dick wouldn’t have the time or the means to write again. And there are many more sinister ones. 

_I seem to have survived,_ Nix writes, hoping he sounds wry, _but at what cost? I’m terribly sober._

He pauses, drumming the pen against his chin.

_Word travels slow from the front but I heard you all finally pushed through Belgium successfully. I assume I haven’t heard from you because they’ve had you on the move. As you can imagine it’s quite boring here so I am in need of your longest, driest update on the latest battalion exploits when you get a moment. The sooner the better._

Again, he stops, the weight of words unsaid gathering in his wrist, in the taut muscles of his hand.

_I’m doing my best here. I am hanging tough, like you told me to._

The soldier in the bed to his left dies of pneumonia in the first week of March and Nix, a day later, decides he’s had enough recuperation. The scars on his neck and chest only hurt when he breathes; his head only feels stuffed with cotton, full to bursting, when he stands up too fast. There’s a Dog company replacement recovering from trench foot in the next ward over who points him in the right direction, and so Nix gathers up his few possessions and hitches the first ride to the continent he can find. Dick’s two letters are heavy in his breast pocket. 

By the time he arrives in Haguenau, he’s told the 506 are already in Germany proper, but leaving Berlin to the Russians. He spends the night on a patch of floor in the burnt out shell of an apothecary shop that bears the telltale signs of soldierly habitation—a floor blanketed with cigarette butts and the tops of bean cans and torn playing cards. He tries to imagine an immaculate Dick among such squalor but the image is too dissonant to entertain for more than a moment; instead, he gets a flash of Dick in Toccoa, leading him off into the woods, smiling with his eyes rather than his mouth. 

He catches rides where he can, cramming in next to enlisted men in the backs of trucks that rumble over shelled earth. The eyes that stare back at him more often than not belong to wide-eyed replacements, their gazes fixed on the landscape of angry skin visible over his collar. He can think of nothing to say to them. To anyone. The closer he gets to Dick, the more urgent the whole journey feels. The weightlessness of the hospital recedes further and further from his consciousness, replaced only by a seething awareness of all that may have happened in his absence. He rereads Dick’s letters, looks for evidence of calamity between the lines. _Unbalanced,_ he reads, and his heart stomps against his ribs. 

His last ride is in the back of a jeep. When the captain in the front seat offers him a cigarette, his first since liberation from the hospital, he takes it and is shocked by the burn that pursues itself down his throat. He smokes it down to the nub, partly because he does not want to seem ungrateful and partly because it makes him feel closer to another version of himself, a younger one that rode shotgun with Dick at the wheel. 

The image is nearly complete when Carwood Lipton is the first familiar face he sees.

“Well, damn,” says Lip, with a smile that does not conceal the exhaustion in his eyes. “Look what the cat dragged in.”

Nix springs from the backseat with as much vigor as he can muster to clap Lip on the back. “Yeah, couldn’t stand missing out on all the fun. How are you finding Germany so far?”

“Looks just like fucking Belgium,” Lipton says. “Somehow I expected more.”

Nix laughs—a wheezing, broken noise—and follows Lip into town, where he finds what remains of the battalion doing what they do best: finding elaborate methods of distraction between being called up to do what they actually do best. Things seem quiet, and Nix finds himself relaxing, ever so slightly. The familiar rhythms are still intact; surely that means catastrophe has not reigned the way it has in his imagination. 

He turns to Lip with that most essential of questions already rushing to his lips, but the expression on Harry’s face stops him in his tracks.

“Look, Nix,” says Lip, eyes on the ground. “I know you’re probably wondering where Captain Winters is.”

Nix can only nod.

“I don’t know how to tell you this.” 

Lip hesitates, and Nix feels something hot and furious spread beneath his skin. “Just say it.”

“He was wounded in Belgium. A week or two after you,” says Lipton. “We were trying to take Foy, Dike was fubaring it, so Winters and Speirs ran in to lead the assault. Nobody could stop him.”

“And?”

“He pulled it off.” Lip scratches the back of his head, and Nix follows his line of sight toward a collection of replacements trading K rations. “But a mortar landed right next to him while he was taking cover. I saw it. Nothing he could’ve done.”

Nix takes a long breath before speaking again. “But he’s alive?”

“Pretty banged up, but yeah. Evacuated back to France a while ago, I think.” Lip gives a nervous chuckle. “Takes more than that to kill a man as tough as Dick Winters.”

“You haven’t heard from him?”

“Uh, no.” Again, Lip won’t look at him. “He was...in a pretty bad way when they pulled him out. So I imagine it would take a while for him to feel up to writing.”

He can feel the wealth of information Lipton is withholding, and it makes him want to sprint back the way he’s come, back through punctured Germany and into bulldozed Belgium to whatever field hospital safeguards Dick, condition unknown, his silence now deafening. 

“You look okay, though,” Lip says, laying a hand on his shoulder. “We thought they got you pretty good, but you’re all healed up. It’s never as bad as it seems, you know?”

Nix can’t formulate a response. His mind is racing ahead, calculating fastest routes and cataloguing favors owed to him by soldiers across the ETO. He’s already AWOL, he reasons. Might as well stay off the radar a little longer. 

The sun is dipping low in the sky, though—he won’t be able to get moving until the next morning. Lip, as though sensing his plans, doesn’t bother to direct him to battalion command. He leads him to the half-shelled mansion where most of Easy company is settled in for the night, where a few dozen pairs of empty eyes greet him as joyously as can be expected after a year on and off the front. Among them, Nix feels satisfyingly concealed—no questions are asked about why he has appeared in a condition clearly unfit for duty, or why he seems eager to run off again. He beds down next to Speirs beneath a tattered chandelier, then gives up on sleep and sits up to reorganize his pack, moving quietly in the thick night.

After a while, he realizes Speirs is awake beside him.

“You’re gonna track him down?” Ron asks, motionless in the dark.

Nix does not look at him, acutely aware of what his own face may reveal. “First thing tomorrow.”

Speirs is silent for a long moment, and Nix wonders idly if Speirs will turn him into command, rat him out for desertion of duty. Nix cannot muster any fear at the idea of it, just irritation. He doesn’t have the time. And then he wonders what this looks like to everyone else—just devotion to an old friend? Pursued with the kind of natural intensity that war inspires? Or something else?

He can’t bring himself to care. Bastogne has knocked something loose in his brain, made him dogged and reckless and all too aware of what had only been theoretical before but is now pressingly clear: they are dead men, granted life for only a brief moment in the dark.

“The earlier the better,” says Ron finally, rolling over.

Nix pauses, fingering the letters safe in his pocket, and then whispers, “How bad was it, Ron? Did you see it?”

“I dunno, Nix,” Speirs says. “There was a lot of blood. But I suppose there always is.”

Nix hums, clenching a fist absently. 

“Find Doc Roe. He’d know better.”

But Nix doesn’t bother. He leaves before first light, thinking of Dick lying alone on a cot somewhere, waiting for him. Ron’s words echo in his head. _But I suppose there always is._

A medic he doesn’t recognize gives him the name of the town with the field hospital nearest to Foy. A lieutenant who owes him money gets him a ride back into Belgium. There, the hospital is long gone, and a noncom tells him that he vaguely remembers a Winters coming through, getting triaged after a mortar hit, and that they would have shipped him down to Calais before sending him over the Channel for further treatment. Nix traces his way backwards, reversing the progress Easy company has made over these last few months, time moving in reverse as he encounters familiar crossroad after familiar crossroad. 

He tastes rain on the breeze as he sits in the back of troop transports, passing fields of budding green punctuated by craters and burnt-out villages. The smoke still hangs in the air, mixed with the smell of dead horses and rotting crops. The roads are slick with spring mud. The further back he goes, the merrier the men seem, their uniforms as fresh as their faces. The cycle of life is offensive to him, now; the machinery of war crueler than it is necessary. The skin on his neck stings in the wind.

He spends the nights in tents, in the grotesque remains of hotels, in the backs of abandoned trucks. When there are no vehicles to hitch onto or commandeer, he walks, his breath rattling with every step. But then he’s in Calais, wandering between the walking wounded, scouring cots for faces he knows. A Fox company captain he vaguely remembers from Toccoa is in charge of evacuations to England, and it’s him that Nix falls upon first. 

“Yeah, I think there was a Captain Winters a while back,” he says, flipping through a pile of thin printouts on his desk. “I recognized the name. Toccoa guys look out for each other, yeah?”

In another life, Nix would have rolled his eyes at the platitude, but now he just grunts affirmatively. 

“Yeah, here he is,” says the captain, locating the manifest. “He was scheduled to get taken across on a British Destroyer a couple weeks ago. Probably in Surrey by now.”

“Sorry, did you say Winters?” A sergeant has appeared, materializing from the stream of bodies outside, blinking in the sudden low light of the green canvas tent. He looks with uncertainty at Nix, who for the first time is vaguely aware of his own appearance—beard grown out, hair curling long at his neck, uniform far from regulation, scars visible and angry. Eyes wild. The sergeant persists. “I moved a Winters. Last week.”

“And?” Nix says, turning the full force of his gaze on the boy, reaching for the flask in his back pocket that isn’t there anymore. 

“I’m sorry, sir, but he passed away en route,” says the sergeant. “An infection, the doc said. He didn’t have any strength left.”

Nix’s ears have been buzzing for months, he realizes. A steadily crescendoing roar. But only now, standing still, can he hear it. 

“Oh, that’s a real shame,” says the lieutenant, looking to Nix. “He was a hell of a guy, I’m sure.”

Nix does not move. 

“Are you alright, sir?”

He should shake someone’s hand, Nix thinks. He should shake someone’s hand and then turn around and walk away, like Dick would do, and get back to work winning this war. He should say _thank you for your time._

He realizes that if he opens his mouth, he’s going to scream.

In the end, he must have walked away. Must have said something to someone, in a tone of voice normal enough to get turned back toward Germany, to be handed a rifle and a map and told to report to command HQ by 0800 hours. And, if Lewis Nixon seems stranger, quieter, angrier now than he used to be, no one can think of anything to say about it.


	2. Part Two

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> well, this was a lot. love you guys <3

_One year later_

To get through the pile of discharge paperwork on his desk, a rousing Shostakovich waltz is required; without a record player he hums it himself, weaving in and out of tune thoughtlessly as midday sun hits his back. The wall behind him is flimsy, his entire office hardly more substantial than a bivouac. It’s been a cold spring on Hokkaido, pushed by a hard wind from the sea, and now he welcomes the unexpected strength of the light. 

“Major Nixon,” says his orderly, saluting as he bursts through the door in his customary way. Thompson has always seemed inexplicably harried; despite never seeing any action he appears perpetually poised to dive toward any nearby, foxhole-like object. Today, the patina of light hair on his head is even more matted with sweat than usual. He’s carrying a parcel of official looking papers. 

“Looking forward to your weekend?” Nix says, leaning back in his chair. He thinks about a life he lived, not very long ago, where four o’clock on a Friday meant less than nothing to him, where days bled together like a wound into snow.

“Oh, yes sir.”

“Going into town to meet your girl?”

Thompson smiles shyly. “I told her I’d be prompt this time.”

“You will be if I have anything to say about it,” Nix says. “Where’re you meeting her?”

“Odori Park. Next to the fountain.” Thompson looks sheepish. “She won’t tell me which one. Likes to keep me guessing, I suppose.”

Nix snorts, then nods toward the papers. “Something from the Colonel?”

“Yes sir.”

Nix sighs and accepts the manila folder with resignation. They’re sending him back to Fort Dix for eight weeks of training and while he supposes that it’s meant to be a reward—time home in exchange for long years served—all he actually feels is dread. A trip to the Nixon homestead will be unavoidable, and he no longer has drink as a shield against whatever unpleasantness will no doubt ensue. To step back into that world will be to confront a life he’s forgotten how to live in his time away. 

“Are you going into Sapporo this weekend, sir?” Thompson asks.

“No, I think I’ll stay here and enjoy the quiet with all of you off base,” Nix replies, smiling at him fondly. 

“Well, if that’ll be all, sir, I was hoping—”

“Yes, go ahead, of course. See you on Monday.”

Thompson scampers out, leaving behind a pile of internal memos on the edge of Nix’s desk. Beneath the stack is a letter emblazoned with his mother’s swooping handwriting. He hasn’t read personal mail in months, and generally tells Thompson not to even bother bringing it in, but the orderly has only ever been semi-proficient in taking orders. He contemplates the creased, battered envelope for a few moments. Weighs it in his hands, thinks of how far it has come. Then he puts it back down on the desk, and walks out.

Major Lewis Nixon does not drink. Major Lewis Nixon limits his smoking to five cigarettes a day, or seven if he’s under stress. Major Lewis Nixon occasionally plays cards in the evening for pocket change, or asks a lady to join him for dinner in the officer’s club, though never more than once. His weekends are not spent in Sapporo’s bars and movie theaters, but are more often spent on base or hiking the whitecapped mountains that cup the city softly in their palms. On mornings when he awakes early, unsettled by a dream behind him or a task ahead of him, he may venture to the coast where, sometimes, he steps into the frigid Ishikari Bay and lets himself be held by the bobbing waves, eyes on the domed sky above him, where the arrangements of stars are different than they were in Bastogne. 

The Major Nixon that parachuted into Tokyo with the 11th Airborne is different than the Captain Nixon that was blown halfway to hell in Belgium, different than the Captain Nixon who made a valiant effort to drink himself to death shortly thereafter. But by the latter of these events Captain Nixon was already dead, for all intents and purposes. Buried with someone named Dick Winters. The new Nix had lost his taste for alcohol somewhere along the way, and he blames Bastogne for that: the blast that had nearly torn him all to shreds had rearranged his molecules, too, he thinks. Remade him in an unrecognizable body, his old vices unreachable, obsolete, useless. With his base physiology changed, he’d decided to become someone else. It had not been terribly difficult; a mold existed, and he had stepped into it. 

But to go back to New Jersey would be to undo that work, he knows. To confront his old self, on older battlegrounds, will inevitably lead to other confrontations with other selves. On top of this is the fact that he can feel the Army’s growing impatience with him—with the war over, his usefulness is beginning to run out. And they never entirely trusted him, anyways, not the drunk Nixon and never quite the reformed one either. He’d barely escaped a court martial for going AWOL during his quest to find Dick and the ensuing bender, and he’s still paying for that misstep. He can see the progression ahead of him clearly: they’ll send him back to the States permanently, give him something entirely trivial to work on, promote him to lieutenant colonel and then turn him out with an honorable discharge. And then he’ll be back at Nixon Nitration, probably drinking, definitely alone, before the decade is over. 

On Saturday he decides to utilize his weekend pass for the sake of a trip up Mt Maruyama, where he can sit on a rocky outcropping and look down on the gray expanse of the city. The day is cold enough that he has the trail and the overlook mostly to himself, and he goes through his five cigarette allowance quickly while he sits. Far off on the horizon he thinks he can see just a slit of sea running along the edge of the sky, blue blending into blue. Behind him, the leaves on the trees shake out a tune to the beat of the breeze.

He thinks about his mother’s letter, still sitting unopened on his desk, and wonders whether it might be time to accept his fate. Distantly, abstractly, he asks himself what Dick would do, and knows instantly that Dick would never make the woman worry as much as Nix already has. He can easily summon the judgmental twist of Dick’s lips to the fore of his mind, and the image turns him warm and cold all at once. 

On the way back down the mountain he stops, just once, to look up at the trees swaying above his head and to swallow down the lump collecting in his throat.

The letter waits for him where he left it the day before. Feeling abruptly heavy, he collapses into his desk chair to read it. The first paragraph harangues him for not replying to her previous letters. The second turns weepy with guilt; the third entreats him to come home safely. The fourth informs him that his sister’s marriage to a bond salesman is already beginning to fray at the edges due to a lascivious and completely baseless rumor, _can you imagine._ The fifth reports on a good quarter at the plant. And the sixth is this:

_And I thought you might like to know that a man that says he’s a friend of yours from when you were in Europe came by. He says that he was coming through town and wanted to know if you made it through the war alright because you didn’t reply to his letters, which I told him had become par for the course for you (!) but that you were doing fine over in Japan as far as any of us knew. He seemed like a nice boy, though I imagine he’d be much handsomer and no doubt married by now if he didn’t have the misfortune of being a ginger._

Something twists in Nix’s chest, against his will. He rereads the paragraph again, then once more, and then puts enormous, unflinching effort into not thinking. He fails. 

He’s due to leave for Fort Dix in five days; the trip halfway across the world will take weeks at best. He jogs across the base and sends a cable immediately. 

_Mother—_

_ Do you remember the name of the man who came to visit?_

_ With love,  
Lewis_

The response comes within a day. The promptness of her reply suggests surprise, and that surprise is apparently enough for her to acquiesce without questioning. 

_I believe he said his name was Dick._

Nix’s breath halts in his throat.

Nix has known agony, has known stagnancy, has known that wound-up-tight kind of anticipation and dread. Bastogne and its aftermath taught him well. But not well enough for this, for long days at sea and then on a train across country, passing vistas he hardly notices, to arrive at Penn Station in a haze. He has not been home in years but whatever euphoria this familiar soil might have inspired is overshadowed by the thought of a haunting. He pictures home and sees only a phantom looming, crowding out all else.

At Fort Dix he’s requisitioned a bunk and thrust into a meeting within minutes. In exchange for the promise of a case of Vat 69 and a carton of cigarettes, he procures a weekend pass from a captain with a missing left eye. Then he’s facing the phone, bracing himself to ignore the perils of the call he’s about to make. 

“Lewis? Is that you?”

His mother’s voice streams through the receiver. He can feel the torrent of questions that exists behind it, waiting for an opening between words. Nix rushes forth to block it. “Yeah, it’s me. The guy who came to visit you. Dick. Did he leave an address or a phone number?”

“Yes, sweetheart, but are you coming home? Are you alright? Your voice sounds a little strange. Are you back in the country—?”

“Mother, yes, but I can’t talk right now. What’s the address?”

Pennsylvania. He scribbles down the street name and digits on the back of a used envelope, then rewrites it in neater handwriting onto a steno pad. There’s something wrong about all this, he thinks. The universe is no longer obeying its own laws. Dick Winters from Pennsylvania died over a year ago in France and yet now there’s a Dick Winters wandering around the eastern seaboard, invading the life Nix has carefully, tenuously constructed in his absence. 

His mother is still launching questions at him.

“Mom, hold on a second. Are you sure his name was Dick?”

“Yes? I think? He only stayed for an hour.” She pauses. “Tall boy, red hair. Asked if we had any milk when I offered him a drink.”

The hair on the back of Nix’s neck stands straight up. This is what it feels like to go mad, to become unraveled. This is the natural world coming undone. “Are you _sure_?”

“Lewis, what is going on? Why is this important?” she asks, voice gaining momentum. “And more to the point: why haven’t you come home? Why didn’t you answer any of my letters? What’s happened to you?”

“I can’t get into it right now.”

“Are you okay?” she says. “You know you can tell me, whatever it is. I know the whole thing with Kathy is less than ideal but the lawyers are on it, darling, and I know you were wounded and if it’s scars you’re worried about then you really shouldn’t be, I can find ten young ladies in a mile radius who couldn’t care less when it comes to war heroes—”

“Mother, Jesus, that’s not it.” He rubs at the bridge of his nose. “I can’t talk right now. I have to go.”

“Are you coming home?” she asks again, and he tries to imagine it: walking into his childhood home as he is now, sober and scarred, and having all the old fights. And then he thinks of the ghost of Dick, somewhere out in the wilds of Pennsylvania, and loses the ability to process thought.

He hangs up. 

The train takes him to Lancaster. He presents the address to the first local he finds and is directed southwards, into a suburb still dusted with frost while the sun hangs at half mast in the sky. He’s in uniform and a chill cuts through him whenever a breeze blows down the wide street just like it does on mornings in Sapporo. The world feels quiet and insulated, stowed away for safekeeping like Christmas ornaments wrapped in tissue paper. It’s Saturday afternoon and he’s taking a walk through a perfectly nice neighborhood and the war is over and yet he’s more scared, more twisted on the inside, than he ever was in Bastogne.

He’s going to find an empty house, he thinks. Or he’s going to find some other man inside it, another redhead called Dick and it’ll have all been a mistake, a coincidence, a strange tale of crossed wires. Or maybe he’ll find an empty plot of land, marked only by a blackened crater, and it’ll all have been a dream, a fevered delusion, the ghost of a ghost. 

But the number on a mailbox ahead of him comes into focus and the house is standing there, a bungalow of modest proportions, entirely unmortared. The gravel driveway is empty, the front stoop boxed in by blooming daffodils except for a thin brick sidewalk leading up to it. He stands on the bottom step, looking upward at the dull stare of the second floor windows. No movement. There comes no answering thud of footsteps when he presses the doorbell. But the door is unlocked, and there’s a heaviness in his hand that he’s distantly aware of himself using to push down the knob and then the door is swinging open and he’s stepping inside and the heart that pounds in his throat is making the wilted skin there throb with each thunderous, chafing beat. 

The house is silent. 

Nix makes a concentrated effort not to look at the pictures lining the walls of the hallway: the graduation photos, the family portraits, medals hanging behind glass. He walks on silent feet down the long carpet to the end of the hall, where a back door is propped open. Framed in the door’s top window is a body, sitting beneath a massive oak in the yard, a book held aloft in one freckled right arm. Nix watches himself slip through the propped door, watches himself cross the creaking wood porch to stand in the gap between railings. Now is the time to wake up from the dream, he thinks. Now is the time to look up and see the stars above Sapporo and remind himself of what’s real.

The body under the tree moves.

“Hey, Nix,” it says. “It’s been a while.”

Something snaps, internally and externally. A twig in the yard bends and breaks beneath Dick’s left foot. Inside Nix, something comes loose in his chest with the force of a .30 caliber bullet fired from an M1. He feels himself splinter and has to turn away, has to bring a hand up to his mouth and squeeze his eyes shut and fight the convulsion of a sob working up his throat, invading his mouth, breaking the line of his teeth. 

“Hey, Nix, don’t—” Dick has appeared at his side. “Are you alright?”

Nix turns his back to him. He presses his palms hard into his eyes, and so feels rather than sees when Dick swivels his head around in search of prying neighbors. A hand lands on Nix’s elbow. “Come on,” says Dick. “Come inside.”

Nix allows himself to be herded back through the door, into the shadowy kitchen, and maneuvered into a creaking wicker chair at the table. It takes a while for his eyes to come back into focus, for his breath to even out, for the color in his cheeks to flatten from red into moist pink. Dick, wordlessly, hands him a tea towel to wipe his eyes and that’s when Nix sees it. 

“I bet you didn’t expect to find me like this,” Dick says, motioning casually toward the stump where his left forearm used to be. 

“I expected you to be dead,” Nix says, and inspects the rest of Dick that he can see: his left earlobe is missing, and shrapnel pockmarks gouge the side of his head and neck and shoulder. Nix is aware, too, of the new rasp in his own voice, the scars visible down his neck, the persistent deafness in his left ear. _Unbalanced,_ he thinks distantly. Both of them, in pieces. 

Dick is leaning against the counter when the kettle comes to a boil. A moment later he uses one hand to bring two mugs of coffee over to the round little table, and Nix wishes, briefly, that he could pull out a flask to embellish his cup, if just to see Dick’s familiar, silent judgment.

“Not dead,” says Dick, carefully neutral. “Just sent home. How’d you figure I was dead?”

Nix shakes his head, running over that day in Calais for the first time since it happened. It’s a time he thought he’d done a decently thorough job of wiping from his memory, but now it comes back to him: the way all his blood had seemed to clot in his veins when he heard the words. “They told me—I guess it must’ve been a mistake. A different Winters. I don’t know. I believed it, for whatever reason.”

“So little faith in me,” Dick says, the edge of a smile visible over the top of his mug. 

“I thought it was what I deserved,” says Nix, and then wonders why he has allowed these words to slip out, at this late hour in the day, in the ferocious quiet of this house. He takes evasive action. “Is your family home?”

Dick shakes his head. “My folks are gone for the weekend to visit my sister. I’m looking after the cat.” 

He motions toward the sitting room through a door to their left, where Nix can just make out the feet of an orange cat napping on the recliner. There’s a lot lurking beneath Dick’s matter-of-fact statement, he suspects, that would explain why he’s opted to be alone this weekend. The disconnect between civilians and soldiers, between life in war and life at home, between parents and children. But all Dick offers is a brief tightening of his jaw, and Nix nods in understanding. 

“You know, when your mother told me you’d stayed in the service, I couldn’t believe it,” Dick says, eyeing his uniform. “You never seemed like the military career type.”

“You spoke to my mother?” Nix says, though of course he had known this to be true already. But it had seemed impossible, then, that a dead man had actually sat in his childhood home. Even now he can hardly picture it—Dick and his parents in the same room, sharing the same air, discussing his own fate. 

“She seemed worried about you,” Dick says. “Said you weren’t answering letters from her either.”

“You sent me letters?”

Dick eyes him coolly. “A few. When you didn’t reply—well, I figured it was for the best. You were being pragmatic, I thought.”

“Pragmatic.”

“Yeah.” Dick reaches over to scratch at his elbow, just above the hard stop of what remains of his arm, and Nix can’t help but stare. Dick doesn’t take his eyes off him. “The war was going to end and you were going back to your wife, so maybe it was better not to drag things out.”

He could laugh at that, almost. Because even when he had a wife, even when he was preparing to jump into France and not putting much stock in the possibility of getting out again, he’d still been trying to wend his way toward some method of getting Dick to stay by his side after the war. Scheming some way to preserve their life in Europe as long as possible, or woo Dick back to New Jersey with him, or wander off to some quiet end of the world. To hell with the consequences, he’d felt then. Since meeting Dick Winters he’d never once had a pragmatic thought.

“Kathy divorced me,” Nix says. 

“Oh.” Dick raises an eyebrow. “I’m sorry.”

Nix waves him off, looks down at the table, digs his nails into his palm. Dick watches him, calm as ever, and Nix wants to upset him, for some reason. Wants him to understand what the last year has been like.

“It’s not your fault,” Nix says. “It was a long time coming.” 

“How have you been?” Dick asks, leaning forward, and it’s funny to ask this question, now. Funny for both of them to have ignored that most basic of pleasantries. Nix realizes he could say something. Could really say it, and mean it, and Dick might be appalled by the outpouring but at least he’d know.

“Fine,” says Nix. “I’ve been fine.”

“You look different.” Dick is not looking at the scars on his neck, but at his face, his hands.

“Stopped drinking.”

“Really?”

“Yeah,” Nix says. “Sort of by accident. But also because of you, I suppose.”

Dick sits back in his chair, a smile pulling at his mouth. “I had to die for you to stop drinking.”

Nix snorts into his mug. “Jesus Christ. Since when did you grow a sense of humor? Now, of all times?”

“It wasn’t easy.” Dick shrugs. The gesture isn’t as light, as carefree, as Nix imagines it is supposed to be. It’s been a long, hard year, in Japan and in Pennsylvania. “You look okay, though. You don’t look too torn up.”

“Yeah, I’m alright,” Nix says. “What can I say? God loves me.”

“It is strange, though.” 

“What is?”

Dick crosses his arms over his chest, shakes his head with a little rueful smile. “I won’t say it. You’ll think I’m—I don’t know.”

“I won’t think anything,” Nix says, beginning to laugh, the feeling foreign in his mouth. “I promise to have no thoughts.”

“No, it’s just—your voice. It’s different. When I used to hear it—” Here, he points vaguely to his own head, and continues, “when I thought of you. I always saw you just as you were.” He looks sheepish, trails off. Out the window behind his head, the sky has turned turgid with a line of gray clouds.

Nix cocks his head. “You thought of me?” he asks, aiming for wry and falling short.

Dick doesn’t smile. “Every day.”

This would be the moment to explain, Nix thinks, if he could find the words. He wants to allow Dick the vanity of knowing exactly what the world felt like without him in it. But all he does is reach into his breast pocket and pull out the two letters Dick had sent him while he was still recovering in England. They’ve followed him across the world, pressed close to his chest with every step. “Dick,” he says, finally. “I don’t want to be pragmatic. Not anymore.”

Dick fixes him with a long, even look. His right hand is just beginning to move when the downpour begins outside.

“The windows,” Dick says, eyes springing towards the stairs. “I’ve gotta close the windows upstairs.”

Then he’s up and moving and Nix stays sitting at the table, just for a moment, before getting up to follow.

It turns out the windows are only open in one room—the bedroom at the end of the hall, where rain has already splashed onto the windowsill and sent a cold wind blowing across the neatly made bed. A footlocker in the corner is propped open with familiar-looking field manuals. Nix pauses at the door, leaning against the jamb as Dick pulls down the sash with a bang. Rain hits the glass with an insistence that suggests retaliation for its subjugation to the outside world. 

“It’s freezing,” Nix says. “Why have the windows open to begin with?”

Even in the graying light, Nix can see him blush. Dick’s eyes are aimed down, where he’s wiping the moisture off the sill with an efficient flip of his wrist. “Don’t like to sleep with them closed. It feels...claustrophobic.”

Nix thinks of a time, far enough back in his mind to be on par with antiquity, when he would’ve killed for a closed window in a warm room to replace a hole in the ground that seethed with the smell of smoke and blood. But Dick’s admission rings just as true as the memory of its sensory opposite, and he finds himself nodding in understanding. He crosses the room to stand at Dick’s side, directs his gaze out the window into the damp expanse of green yard and the glowing windows of the house next door. “This was your room as a kid?” he asks.

“Yeah,” says Dick, a flash of fondness bounding across his face and away again. “This was my view. I didn’t think much of it, then.”

“It has its charms,” Nix says, craning his neck forward to watch a cardinal swoop toward a waiting branch. When he turns back to the room, Dick’s eyes are on the skin at his throat.

“Can I see?” Dick asks, voice low. 

Nix pauses for a moment, then steps out of the frame of the window. “Yes.”

With one hand Dick makes quick work of his tie, of the first button of his shirt, cool fingers brushing against the patchwork of skin. Nix winces, though it doesn’t hurt. Not really, anymore. Just the ghost of something. It only hurts if he thinks about it, if he pulls it from the periphery of his vision to the fore, if he contemplates what the skin once looked like and who once looked at it. But he has become an expert at the art of non-thinking, or thought so until a moment ago. Now, he searches Dick’s expression carefully for evidence of disgust, or unrecognition, and finds only Dick’s usual neutrality, as comforting as it is disconcerting.

Dick stops moving, the scarred end of his left arm hovering on the hollow of Nix’s throat. Nix does not breathe, his eyes on where Dick’s mouth forms one syllable, his voice barely above a whisper.

“Lew,” says Dick, hand coming up to cup his jaw, and kisses him.

The rain clears into a dewy, shimmering night. Outside there slithers the sounds of doors opening and shutting, dogs barking, the shout of a mother calling a child into dinner. In Dick’s twin bed, half-covered by a blue and white quilt, Lew dozes. Dick’s head lays against his shoulder, an arm tossed across his chest, and down at the foot of the bed Lew can make out the white shine of the scar on Dick’s ankle. The one mark on his body that is not new, but familiar, calling him like a beacon toward something he can’t name.

“I missed you,” Dick murmurs against his skin, and when Lew looks down he finds a look of surprise on Dick’s face, as though the words have spilled out of their own accord. So rarely have they been able to speak candidly that the muscle feels tight and unused when Lew tries to think of a response. He can think only of the language of ghosts; the haunting of words unsaid. He presses his nose into the part of Dick’s hair instead. 

“Listen.” Dick is speaking again, his voice gravelly and low. “There’s this piece of land I’ve been looking at, out near Hershey.”

Lew lets out a somnolent hum.

“A few acres, mostly trees,” Dick says. “A few planting fields, low maintenance stuff. Secluded, is the main thing.”

Dick’s hand is warm on his chest. Persuasive. He understands what is being proposed. And he understands that Dick’s family will be home in a few days, wondering how he has spent his time alone. And Lew will have to return to Fort Dix and salute his superiors and sit in an office and then he’ll have to go back to Nixon and present himself, blemished and new, to his old life. And then back to Sapporo to finish his tour. But there is an _after_, he thinks. There is something that exists beyond all that, or could. He’s not sure he believes it now, but he could be persuaded. There’s a house in a copse of trees, Dick is saying. Room for chickens or goats to wander. A space in the sky for the stars to fill. Lew lies on his back, Dick’s voice close to his ear, and looks upward.


End file.
